Dear Younger Me
I disappeared for a while.
Not because I ran out of stories, but because life became one.
Somewhere between endings I didn’t expect and beginnings I wasn’t prepared for, I found myself learning lessons I never asked for. Some broke me. Some rebuilt me. All of them changed me.
So here I am, writing again.
Dear younger me, you thought certainty was something other people had and you simply hadn’t found yet. It never comes. Peace doesn’t arrive when the uncertainty ends, it arrives the day you stop needing it to.
You will apply, prepare, show up fully, and still not get the seat. That isn’t proof you’re behind. It’s just proof you tried.
You will meet people who take and don’t give back. Let them go. Boundaries were never betrayal, they were just you finally choosing yourself.
You will find a voice you didn’t know you had, one that speaks for the women who can’t. You won’t plan it. It will find you in the wreckage of everything else and become the most important work you do.
You don’t owe anyone a comeback timeline. Disappearing wasn’t quitting. Sometimes it’s just what it looks like to survive something instead of performing it for an audience.
I haven’t figured it all out. I’ve just stopped pretending I need to.
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